by Christopher Hall

There’s a certain problem with the status of the word “criticism” in the phrase “literary criticism.” The critical part seems to be concerned, as criticism is in general, with separating the wheat from the chaff, but the literary part seems already to have made a judgement about quality – as long as we take term “literary” to be evaluative and not referring to a particular genre, distinct from the many forms of popular, commercial fiction. There is a curious void between judgement and analysis in literary studies; in one sense, you are working with a set of texts that have “survived,” that have survived a crucial filter of judgement to become worthy of intense study. Even if literary critical methods can be fruitfully applied to “forgotten works” or even non-literary cultural artifacts, this is an elevating of the object’s status; we don’t do the work of digging out a novel from some hidden corner of the 19^th century just to pronounce, finally, that it’s worthless. Literary criticism has thus evolved into thinking of itself as something like an empirical study, which observes but is expected, like polite patrons of a theater, not to judge, at least not too loudly.

In my years as a student of literary studies, I don’t think I encountered – from my professors, at any rate – much literary criticism which was devoted to the evaluative enterprise. If a work of secondary quality was to be discussed, it was under the assumption that it had something of value to say, faults and all. I don’t think much has changed in this regard. Perhaps, as we struggle to define a place for literary study in universities being run like intellectual private equity funds, we ought to reconsider this approach. When evaluation is occurring, it usually happens on the basis of some political failing, some inconsistency with modern moral standards in the object work. I’m talking about something much more basic: students, quite simply, are not being told they have permission to say “this sucks” on a strictly aesthetic basis. This is a shame, because there is both value and a kind of joy in not only declaring that something sucks, but also in carefully teasing out exactly why it sucks. Read more »

Three mountains. Looking northward from Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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NEW POSTS BELOW

by Lei Wang

I’ve been under the weather for about three weeks now: not so incapacitated as to make watching bad TV the only respite, but not quite well either. A persistent, on-off sniffleupagal achiness. The CDC says respiratory illness rates in Iowa right now are Very High, the highest it’s been in years, and I was relieved to hear I was not imagining my woes. Anecdotally, I know something has been going around (many of my friends and 1/3 of my singing a.k.a. breathing in each others’ faces group was sick last week). But some part of me still thinks perhaps I am making up my own symptoms, afraid that my physical lackadaisicality is just moral lassitude, an excuse for avoiding my book and other productivities.

I have written before about how my best friend and I luxuriate in those times when we feel totally “off the hook” from the things we feel so much pressure to accomplish: times of sickness and travel, when you are socially privileged to find respite in creature comforts. But to be only mildly malaised is to be in purgatory, and I feel anew for those with chronic illness and fatigue—to be not just under the weather but under the climate. Esme Wang famously offers a course on writing with limitations—the Unexpected Shape Academy—which includes tips for bursts of writing on the phone or notecards or from bed, rather than long laptop sessions. I wrote this column mostly via texts to myself, and now I sound rather virtuous, but I assure you I do not feel that way.

The other night, in a limbo state of foggy brain, I was lolling about the house in the presence of someone who I admired as Very Efficient. He had been home-schooled and unlike other home-schooled kids who wasted their time without official structure, he finished his schoolwork and then read several extra books a day. Before we started dating, he went to the library’s private closet-sized study rooms on weekends to do college physics problems without interruption for 10 hours straight (he does not study or work in anything relevant to physics). That night, he was reading a thick book about the Cold War, after having already read a thinner book on it. He felt like a laser, and I felt like a lump.

And I noticed how I wanted to have him be gone, so I could be an unperceived potato by myself, which is what I like about living alone. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Jonathan Kujawa

For several years now, the AI companies have been using the annual Putnam exam as one of these benchmarks. The Putnam exam is taken every December by thousands of undergraduates around the world. It has twelve problems, each worth ten points, for a total of 120 points. The exam notoriously difficult [1]. Earning two points on the exam puts you in the top 50%. If you’d like to try this year’s questions, you can find them along with their solutions here.

As this article describes, a number of AI systems were tested against this year’s Putnam exam. The best of them scored 103 points, putting it among the top three humans. Even the worst model earned 58 points, making it comparable to the human ranked 78th (out of the 4329 who took the exam).

One advantage of this benchmark is the Putnam problems are written from scratch every year. It is unlikely that the AI systems are simply repeating answers they’ve seen in their training data [2]. On the other hand, comparing AI Putnam results with those of humans is rather artificial. The AI systems can throw massive amounts of effort against the problems. If you gave me a million well-trained undergraduates in a windowless data center, I bet I could generate a pretty impressive solution set [3]. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Not so long ago, the conventional wisdom in most liberal/left circles was that people concerned about population growth tended to be racists, nativists, and eugenicists. And mostly old white guys, according to a leading UK environmental writer.

“It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed,” wrote George Monbiot.

That description was a caricature when Monbiot wrote it, but today’s wealthiest white men (think Elon Musk) are more likely to advocate population expansion, not reduction. Environmentalists who highlight the problem of population growth—the threats to the health of ecosystems from too many people consuming too much—can’t be dismissed with slurs and stereotypes.

Nandita Bajaj—who is brown, female, and definitely not wealthy—defies those stereotypes. She chose not to have children and has dedicated her life to research and advocacy on behalf of women, vulnerable people, animals, and planetary health. Bajaj is executive director of Population Balance, a group that includes no racists, nativists, or eugenicists. Instead, its members face tough questions about the trajectory of the outsized human presence on Earth. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Who’s Jealous?!. Celestun, Mexico, March 2025.

Digital photograph.

More here.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

When people hear that we should empathize with our adversaries, the reaction is often uneasy. Empathy sounds like softness. It sounds like moral compromise, even capitulation. Why should we try to understand those who compete with us, oppose us, or even threaten us?

The confusion lies in a simple mistake. Empathy is not sympathy. To empathize with someone is not to agree with them, excuse them, or endorse their actions. It is only to attempt to see the world as they see it, to understand what they fear, what they value, and what they believe they must defend. As Ralph White of the United States Information Agency put it, it’s the ability to step into someone else’s skin and experience the world through their eyes. We rarely need to exert ourselves to empathize with friends; shared assumptions do most of the work. It is with adversaries that empathy becomes difficult, and therefore essential. When trust is low and stakes are high, misunderstanding becomes dangerous. Two Cold War episodes make the point, in opposite ways.

The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. We now know that the Soviet missile deployment in Cuba was larger and more advanced than American officials understood at the time. A small miscalculation could have triggered catastrophe and the deaths of hundreds of millions. During those tense days, Nikita Khrushchev sent President Kennedy two communications. One was public and defiant. The other was private and conciliatory in tone. The instinctive response that Kennedy was considering was to answer the public challenge directly, to demonstrate strength.

At that moment, one man in the room possessed something rare: lived familiarity with the adversary. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

As the Pew Research Center reported last week, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty-five countries surveyed and Canada had the brightest. Only 8% of Canadians think their fellow citizens are bad.

Pew floats a few ideas about why this is, the first being political polarization. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see their fellow citizens as bad, though this is consistent across countries for parties out of power. The study also considers that Americans are more judgmental than people in other countries, but finds that—on particular issues—this does not seem to be the case. Americans are, in general, more lenient on acts—save for the perennial culture war weapons of abortion and homosexuality—but tougher on persons, which has the ring of truth. 

Evidence that Americans have reached the point of irreconcilability abounds. Take the recent HBO docuseries Neighbors, a must-see for connoisseurs of what I call “hard cringe.” Soft cringe features awkward social situations but gives viewers occasional relief via punchlines and pratfalls. Curb Your Enthusiasm and the mad cap antics of The Chair Company are soft cringe confections. Hard cringe, on the other hand, comes from Sweden, dating back to Bergman’s Persona and erupting most recently with Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Force Majeure. Hard cringe gives viewers no lifeline and no cues; no permission to breathe, let alone laugh. Ironically, a Canadian—Nathan Fielder—is its leading North American purveyor.

Each episode of Neighbors braids together two unrelated disputes with the lyricism of Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Two sets of preppers in the middle of nowhere can’t agree about a gate. A Vietnam vet and a former male stripper can’t agree who is stalking whom. The creators say the series emerged from their pandemic obsession with watching neighborhood dispute videos on YouTube. It is difficult to watch, as American grown-ups try—and repeatedly fail—to establish the minimal common ground needed to resolve what appear to be incredibly trivial disputes. Violence frequently seems inevitable. Read more »

Driver’s License Renewal Photo

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by John Allen Paulos

What do you call someone who is not religious? There are a lot of choices, but is there a need for a new name for such people? And, whatever they’re called, should not politicians more fully acknowledge them? The philosopher Daniel Dennett and others years ago pushed for the adoption of a new term to signify someone who holds a naturalistic (as opposed to a religious) worldview. They stressed the need for such a term by noting that so many million Americans are atheists, agnostics, or (the largest category) have no religion of preference. I say “so many” because estimating the number is difficult, although 75 million is often mentioned as an estimate.

Polls are a crude instrument for describing those professing so many varieties and degrees of human belief and disbelief. This is especially so with polls that rely on self‑reporting to measure the extent of possibly unpopular opinions. For this and other reasons the number of non-believers may be much higher than most people realize. This brings me to “Brights,” the problematic term that was proposed in 2003 as a way to refer to non‑religious people. The coinage is due to Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, who started an online group intended to further the influence of “Brights.”

On their site they wrote, “Currently the naturalistic worldview is insufficiently expressed within most cultures.” They stated “There is a great diversity of persons who have a naturalistic worldview. Under this broad umbrella, as Brights, these people can gain social and political influence in a society infused with supernaturalism.”

Looking back on this neologism, I don’t think a degree in public relations was needed to predict that many people would construe the term as smug, silly, and arrogant. It’s also simplistic and reductive. Any such attempt to categorize people’s beliefs should recognize that many people who nominally identify with this or that religion still have a naturalistic perspective, not a religious one. Obviously people’s attitudes may be a blend of sorts, something akin to non-binary, but in an epistemic sense and not a gendered one. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

I’m someone who’ll finish a book once I’ve started it, even if I don’t like it very much. Yes, I’m superstitious. If a particular book falls into my hands, I suspect fate may have had some purpose in putting it there. When Steve Bergsman’s I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins popped up in my Amazon recommendations, I hesitated to swipe past it. Who knows but that this book was dropped into the algorithmic stream for the purpose of delivering me into some higher wisdom?

Deliver me it did not—or at least I didn’t give it the chance, setting the book aside halfway through. But Bergsman’s well-researched biography got me thinking about race, performance, and the peculiar moral economy of show business. Best of all, it revived dormant memories of a famous gal named Minnie—and I don’t mean the mouse.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was a rhythm-and-blues singer whose song “I Put a Spell on You” became a kind of underground hit in 1956. But what kept him famous was his outrageous stage show. In its heyday, Hawkins would jump out of a closed coffin, dressed in what he called a “cannibal” outfit, complete with loincloth, war paint, and a plastic bone through his nose. He stalked the stage with a skull on a stick, with a cigarette stuck in its mouth.

As an artist, he seemed to have little constituency among his own race but was patronized—first by promoters, and later by white hipsters, who went to his concerts, put him in movies, and declared “I Put a Spell on You” one of “The 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll” (Rolling Stone). Hawkins’ career sat squarely on a discomfiting seam in twentieth-century popular music, where it is hard to separate elevation from exploitation in a business that soils nearly everyone who enters it. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Last year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I chose several values to focus on during the year. One of these values was comfort and ease. Well, 2025 was an anxious and uncomfortable year in the U.S., and I’m not sure how much I actually did to make my life more comfortable. But I began to learn about my relationship to comfort, and to see that I simultaneously long for it and distrust it as an indulgence. Lately I’ve been trying to reconcile that tension.

When I thought about my ambivalent views of comfort, I started to pay more attention to the ways that we as a culture denigrate comfort. One example of a negative view is the pop psychology advice about getting out of your comfort zone. The proponents of this advice describe the comfort zone as a place of stasis, idleness, or insufficient effort. The idea is that leaving this zone—by doing something that’s new to you, difficult, or otherwise challenging—is crucial to learning and growth.

I’ve always been leery of this advice. I’ve had a vague sense that the comfort zone was a concept borrowed from the corporate world and then applied in other contexts where it might be inappropriate. In addition, I tend to associate it with a focus on performance, that is, human activity that’s evaluated according to some measure—performance on a task or job, say, or athletic or musical performance. These characteristics alone make it less than compelling to me.

I’m also wary of the word growth, even in the phrase personal growth, when the context is that you should push yourself to grow. People sometimes need to rest, or tend to their own physical needs or those of others. Pleasure and enjoyment are vital as ends in themselves. Life is about more than growth. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

Bibiheybat is a settlement on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan. Located along the Caspian Sea, the region became the crown jewel of Imperial Russia for its resources. Modern oil production as we know it today began in this tiny town. In 1846, the Russians began drilling here. It was the first time an oil well was drilled mechanically instead of dug by hand.

By the late 1800s, large oil fields were discovered offshore. Baku by then was producing over half of the world’s demand. But the labor became incredibly dangerous, and oil gushes were common. High-pressure blowouts would spew oil, mud, and gas into the air, and sometimes even ignite. Azerbaijan was known as the “Land of Fire” as these infernos billowed black plumes into the sky.

Russian cinematographer Alexander Michon was in Baku at the time and witnessed one such fiery blowout. Using a fixed hand-cranked Lumière Cinématographe, he captured the scene in a 30-second silent film in 1898. Titled The Oil Gush Fire in Bibiheybat, it is considered the first film shot in Azerbaijan.

Michon was operating in the genre of actuality films. These were proto-documentary B-rolls that captured daily life, much like still photography would. Given that film was still a new medium, actualities dominated these infancy years as cinematographers sought to depict life “as it really was.”

And Michon did so for Azerbaijan, even in all its ugliness, and in doing so he also created the first eco-horror film. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

We humans keep seeing articles about AI. An endless parade of them, it feels like.

We’re the authors, we’re the culprits.

We have our reasons. Good ones, too. Starting with our awe of AI’s growing catalogue of capabilities. Making films indistinguishable from our own, co-working with humans in HR departments, and chatting and philosophizing among themselves in chatbot social networks. The latest wrinkle sees AI working not in chatbot settings but as standalone entities tasked with carrying out specific jobs like writing code for a website but also not-so-specific jobs like overseeing a team of other AI agents and iterating their own development. They’re getting independent. Or as tech evangelist Peter Diamandis put it to his email readers, “We are not incrementally improving chatbots anymore. We’re watching the emergence of autonomous agency at scale.”

As amazing as these are, we are, like cable news, more inclined to read and write about the problems AI seems to pose, for how disconcerting its presence already is.

There’s the financial cost of AI. $1.6 trillion spent on it over the last decade, another $2.5 trillion expected this year. In another world, how many societal ills and injustices could that money remedy?

In spite of that investment, there’s the problem of meager returns on productivity and near-zero contribution of AI to U.S. GDP. Also, the scapegoat problem: blaming layoffs on AI.

There’s AI’s job destruction problem. The CEO of the AI company Anthropic expects it to add 10-20% to unemployment in the next few years. For former presidential hopeful Andrew Yang the number is up to half the country’s 70 million white-collar workers gone by 2028.

There’s a vulnerability problem. The civilization we’ve constructed is digital and connected. AI tools have uncovered vast weaknesses in that infrastructure, an important first step to patching them. But criminals and the criminal curious are greatly represented among the early AI adopters. Imagine the havoc when a criminally inspired AI agent enters the Nasdaq’s network with the instruction to “sell everything” or JPMorgan’s with orders to “set the value of every account to one dollar”. How far away, then, are we from taking Voight-Kampff tests every time we want to check our balance? Not very.

For all this there remains the insistence from AI enthusiasts that we need it, with the uncomfortable caveat: it’s a coin toss—AI will in the end help us or destroy us. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

My friend Arjuna is an archer in the army. He has been on several campaigns, always victorious. His bow is as tall as he is. It is made of wood but strengthened with sinews. The combination makes it firm, supple and elastic. I say that, and marvel at the expert ease with which he handles it, and I know I – man of letters and numbers as I am – would never be able to pull the string back as he does.

At rest, the string is taut, straight, and twangs a healthy, satisfying note when idly plucked. When Arjuna needs it, he pulls in one strong, long motion, as if he is to the string born. Shallow pull if his target is nearby. Deep if he wants to shoot far. To pull it at all needs training and strength. To watch Arjuna pull it so effortlessly is a treat.

Watching him at his craft – for what else is it? – over and over again, I’ve started to obsess about how the bow shoots the arrow forward. Why is a shallow pull enough for close targets, but Arjuna must pull longer for distant ones? Pulling the string back seems to confer a strength of a kind on the bow, and the degree of pull determines the degree of strength. Actually, the more I thought about this, the more intuitive it seemed to me. So I became obsessed with another question. Is there some way to correlate the length of the pull to how much force the arrow gets, to how far it travels when released?

And so … I visit Arjuna when he’s practicing his skills. I watch him shoot arrows over and over, hundreds every day. When not in use, the bow makes a graceful curve, its ends joined by the taut line the string forms. But when Arjuna strings his arrow, the one straight line becomes two, each half as long, and the bow bends. I look carefully at the shape the strings make with the bow. It’s like a slice of what will come to be known, in my country as across the world, as pizza. (Maybe you can tell that I have the gift of seeing into the future.)

The smaller the slice, the more the strength in the bow. There’s my first lesson. But how am I to understand, or describe, “smaller” in this case? Eventually, I decide that the best measure is the distance in a straight line between the ends of the bow. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

As a child, I was lucky to have grown up with two grandmothers: one living with our family and the other visiting from her house in the same city, and staying with us for a few days at a time. Both grandmothers were very kind, and my sisters and I spent a lot of time with them, each of us having a special relationship with them. Mamabozorg was my paternal grandmother, who raised me from the age of one to five, and who, along with my grandfather, became my primary attachment figures. Her name was Zahra, and she lived to be 104, or so we think, since I don’t believe we have an official birth certificate for her, just the usual traditional writing of birth and death dates on the first page of the family koran.  A devout religious person, she prayed five times every day of her life as required by Islam. When she was too old to stand, she would sit in bed and pray, ending with her prayer beads. One of my favorite things as a child was to put my head on her knees, as she was sitting cross-legged on her prayer rug, after her last prayers, saying the name of the Prophet and his first successor as a form of meditation. I felt warm and safe with her, and the world was predictable as it should be for every child. As a traditional Muslim woman, she wore the chador and always kept her headscarf on, even at home.

Mamajoon, Mariam, was my maternal grandmother, the modern grandma. She didn’t wear the chador, unless she was going to some religious event, which she rarely did, but she also wore the head scarf at all times. She was born and raised in Rasht, a city by the Caspian Sea, and, with her grayish-blue eyes, her round hips, and her long silver hair, she remained a beauty in her old age. She had become a widow at a young age and later lost her oldest son to heart disease. She endured having had land and a fortune, then losing it all, but stayed the life-loving person she was. She lived in the United States for some years while raising her young grandson and caring for her college-age son. She loved America and regaled us with stories of banana-split ice cream, cheeseburgers, huge supermarkets with laundromats, and people who followed rules, compared to our unruly ways. She would take us to a new place in Tehran that had donuts, and as my sisters and I were cutting them with our knives and forks, she told us that Americans eat them with their hands. When I visited her in California, we would go to Fashion Island in Newport Beach, where she’d claim a table at an outdoor cafe, order coffee for herself and whatever we wanted for us, smoke her cigarettes, and watch the world go by. Read more »